New from Cambridge University Press!

Sociolinguistics from the Periphery "presents a fascinating book about change: shifting political, economic and cultural conditions; ephemeral, sometimes even seasonal, multilingualism; and altered imaginaries for minority and indigenous languages and their users."

This is the second of two volumes emanating from the Linguistic Symposiumon Romance Languages held at the University of Texas at Austin in February2005. It features the keynote addresses delivered by Prof. Jacques Durandon the Phonology of Contemporary French Project and Prof. John CharlesSmith on skeuomorphy and refunctionalization. It also includes elevencontributions by reputed scholars on topics ranging from phonetics,phonology, morphophonology, dialectology, sociolinguistics and languagevariation. Formal phonology papers favor the model of Optimality Theory,while phonetic measurements serve as the basis for sociolinguistic anddialectometric studies. Many of these studies emphasize new comparative,typological approaches to Romance data (including many non-standardvarieties of French, Italian and Spanish). This volume will be of interestto all Romance linguists.